Seasons

Recommended Grade Level: 6-8

Required Time: 8 forty-five minute sessions

Seasons is a free and innovative 8-day unit that provides interactive videos, hands-on activities, lesson plans, and student worksheets to explore the causes behind Earth’s seasons. The curriculum uses a combination of Earth- and space-based visualizations and models to address common misconceptions and strengthen students’ spatial reasoning skills. Seasons is aligned with standards for middle school Earth and Space Science (NGSS MS-ESS1-1).

The program covers the Sun’s apparent motion in Earth’s sky; Earth’s motion around the Sun; Earth’s tilt; the tilt’s relationship to the seasons; and energy transfer from the Sun to Earth. Join us as we use WorldWide Telescope to journey around the solar system to better understand the causes of seasons on Earth!

Seasons Preview Video

Watch this short video for an introduction and demonstration of the Seasons curriculum in practice.

Curriculum Guide

This Curriculum Guide provides educators with all the necessary materials for each day of the 8-day ThinkSpace Seasons curriculum. You will find included: daily lesson plans; student activity sheets; classroom activities; and (on most days) interactive instructional videos. All of the materials provided on this webpage (other than the Additional Resources) can be found within this Instructional Guide.

Alternate version of the Curriculum: Little Bits is a fun enhancement if your classroom has a budget for it. Curriculum built around these light sensors helps model how the angle of the Sun's rays affect temperature.

Instructional Media

In order to run the Seasons curriculum in your classroom, you will need to use the Seasons multimedia content as well. You have two options here. You can either (1) run a collection of videos on a classroom projector, or (2) download and use the interactive Seasons WorldWide Telescope file (you will need to download the WorldWide Telescope application to your computer as well).

Session 1 | Modeling Day & Night

Session 5 | Modeling Earth's Tilted Axis

Session 5 | Common Mistakes Students Make

Additional Resources

Seasons on WorldWide Telescope

All of the Seasons videos were made using WorldWide Telescope (WWT), a free, interactive software that models our universe and allows users to record tours of their explorations. WWT requires Windows, so the tours are converted into videos for accessibility. However, if you would like the (optional) fully-interactive experience, follow the steps below to install and run WWT.

On This Page

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DRL-1502798 and DRL-1503395. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.